Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

427 Pages·2012·1.61 MB·English

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
Twain, Mark
Published: 1896
Categorie(s): Non-Fiction, Biography & autobiography, Fic-
tion, Historical
Source: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/30480
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About Twain:
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 — April 21,
1910), better known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an
American humorist, satirist, writer, and lecturer. Twain is most
noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which
has since been called the Great American Novel, and The Ad-
ventures of Tom Sawyer. He is also known for his quotations.
During his lifetime, Clemens became a friend to presidents,
artists, leading industrialists, and European royalty. Clemens
enjoyed immense public popularity, and his keen wit and incis-
ive satire earned him praise from both critics and peers. Amer-
ican author William Faulkner called Twain "the father of Amer-
ican literature." Source: Wikipedia
Also available on Feedbooks for Twain:
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
• Life On The Mississippi (1883)
• Roughing It (1872)
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)
• The $30,000 Bequest and other short stories (1906)
• Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)
• The War Prayer (1916)
• Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)
• The Jumping Frog (1865)
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Consider this unique and imposing distinction. Since the
writing of human history began, Joan of Arc is the only
person, of either sex, who has ever held supreme com-
mand of the military forces of a nation at the age of
seventeen
LOUIS KOSSUTH.
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Translator's Preface
To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one
must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours. Judged by
the standards of one century, the noblest characters of an
earlier one lose much of their luster; judged by the standards
of to-day, there is probably no illustrious man of four or five
centuries ago whose character could meet the test at all points.
But the character of Joan of Arc is unique. It can be measured
by the standards of all times without misgiving or apprehen-
sion as to the result. Judged by any of them, it is still flawless,
it is still ideally perfect; it still occupies the loftiest place pos-
sible to human attainment, a loftier one than has been reached
by any other mere mortal.
When we reflect that her century was the brutalest, the wick-
edest, the rottenest in history since the darkest ages, we are
lost in wonder at the miracle of such a product from such a
soil. The contrast between her and her century is the contrast
between day and night. She was truthful when lying was the
common speech of men; she was honest when honesty was be-
come a lost virtue; she was a keeper of promises when the
keeping of a promise was expected of no one; she gave her
great mind to great thoughts and great purposes when other
great minds wasted themselves upon pretty fancies or upon
poor ambitions; she was modest, and fine, and delicate when to
be loud and coarse might be said to be universal; she was full
of pity when a merciless cruelty was the rule; she was stead-
fast when stability was unknown, and honorable in an age
which had forgotten what honor was; she was a rock of convic-
tions in a time when men believed in nothing and scoffed at all
things; she was unfailingly true to an age that was false to the
core; she maintained her personal dignity unimpaired in an age
of fawnings and servilities; she was of a dauntless courage
when hope and courage had perished in the hearts of her na-
tion; she was spotlessly pure in mind and body when society in
the highest places was foul in both—she was all these things in
an age when crime was the common business of lords and
princes, and when the highest personages in Christendom
were able to astonish even that infamous era and make it stand
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aghast at the spectacle of their atrocious lives black with un-
imaginable treacheries, butcheries, and beastialities.
She was perhaps the only entirely unselfish person whose
name has a place in profane history. No vestige or suggestion
of self-seeking can be found in any word or deed of hers. When
she had rescued her King from his vagabondage, and set his
crown upon his head, she was offered rewards and honors, but
she refused them all, and would take nothing. All she would
take for herself—if the King would grant it—was leave to go
back to her village home, and tend her sheep again, and feel
her mother's arms about her, and be her housemaid and help-
er. The selfishness of this unspoiled general of victorious
armies, companion of princes, and idol of an applauding and
grateful nation, reached but that far and no farther.
The work wrought by Joan of Arc may fairly be regarded as
ranking any recorded in history, when one considers the condi-
tions under which it was undertaken, the obstacles in the way,
and the means at her disposal. Caesar carried conquests far,
but he did it with the trained and confident veterans of Rome,
and was a trained soldier himself; and Napoleon swept away
the disciplined armies of Europe, but he also was a trained sol-
dier, and he began his work with patriot battalions inflamed
and inspired by the miracle-working new breath of Liberty
breathed upon them by the Revolution—eager young appren-
tices to the splendid trade of war, not old and broken men-at-
arms, despairing survivors of an age-long accumulation of
monotonous defeats; but Joan of Arc, a mere child in years, ig-
norant, unlettered, a poor village girl unknown and without in-
fluence, found a great nation lying in chains, helpless and
hopeless under an alien domination, its treasury bankrupt, its
soldiers disheartened and dispersed, all spirit torpid, all cour-
age dead in the hearts of the people through long years of for-
eign and domestic outrage and oppression, their King cowed,
resigned to its fate, and preparing to fly the country; and she
laid her hand upon this nation, this corpse, and it rose and fol-
lowed her. She led it from victory to victory, she turned back
the tide of the Hundred Years' War, she fatally crippled the
English power, and died with the earned title of DELIVERER
OF FRANCE, which she bears to this day.
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And for all reward, the French King, whom she had crowned,
stood supine and indifferent, while French priests took the
noble child, the most innocent, the most lovely, the most ador-
able the ages have produced, and burned her alive at the
stake.
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A Peculiarity of Joan of Arc's History
The details of the life of Joan of Arc form a biography which is
unique among the world's biographies in one respect: It is the
only story of a human life which comes to us under oath, the
only one which comes to us from the witness-stand. The official
records of the Great Trial of 1431, and of the Process of Rehab-
ilitation of a quarter of a century later, are still preserved in
the National Archives of France, and they furnish with remark-
able fullness the facts of her life. The history of no other life of
that remote time is known with either the certainty or the com-
prehensiveness that attaches to hers.
The Sieur Louis de Conte is faithful to her official history in
his Personal Recollections, and thus far his trustworthiness is
unimpeachable; but his mass of added particulars must depend
for credit upon his word alone.
THE TRANSLATOR.
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The Sieur Louis de Conte, To his Great-Great-
Grand Nephews and Nieces
This is the year 1492. I am eighty-two years of age. The things
I am going to tell you are things which I saw myself as a child
and as a youth.
In all the tales and songs and histories of Joan of Arc, which
you and the rest of the world read and sing and study in the
books wrought in the late invented art of printing, mention is
made of me, the Sieur Louis de Conte—I was her page and sec-
retary, I was with her from the beginning until the end.
I was reared in the same village with her. I played with her
every day, when we were little children together, just as you
play with your mates. Now that we perceive how great she
was, now that her name fills the whole world, it seems strange
that what I am saying is true; for it is as if a perishable paltry
candle should speak of the eternal sun riding in the heavens
and say, "He was gossip and housemate to me when we were
candles together." And yet it is true, just as I say. I was her
playmate, and I fought at her side in the wars; to this day I
carry in my mind, fine and clear, the picture of that dear little
figure, with breast bent to the flying horse's neck, charging at
the head of the armies of France, her hair streaming back, her
silver mail plowing steadily deeper and deeper into the thick of
the battle, sometimes nearly drowned from sight by tossing
heads of horses, uplifted sword-arms, wind-blow plumes, and
intercepting shields. I was with her to the end; and when that
black day came whose accusing shadow will lie always upon
the memory of the mitered French slaves of England who were
her assassins, and upon France who stood idle and essayed no
rescue, my hand was the last she touched in life.
As the years and the decades drifted by, and the spectacle of
the marvelous child's meteor flight across the war firmament
of France and its extinction in the smoke-clouds of the stake
receded deeper and deeper into the past and grew ever more
strange, and wonderful, and divine, and pathetic, I came to
comprehend and recognize her at last for what she was—the
most noble life that was ever born into this world save only
One.
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Part 1
In Domremy
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Chapter 1
When Wolves Ran Free in Paris
I, THE SIEUR LOUIS DE CONTE, was born in Neufchateau, on
the 6th of January, 1410; that is to say, exactly two years be-
fore Joan of Arc was born in Domremy. My family had fled to
those distant regions from the neighborhood of Paris in the
first years of the century. In politics they were Armag-
nacs—patriots; they were for our own French King, crazy and
impotent as he was. The Burgundian party, who were for the
English, had stripped them, and done it well. They took
everything but my father's small nobility, and when he reached
Neufchateau he reached it in poverty and with a broken spirit.
But the political atmosphere there was the sort he liked, and
that was something. He came to a region of comparative quiet;
he left behind him a region peopled with furies, madmen, dev-
ils, where slaughter was a daily pastime and no man's life safe
for a moment. In Paris, mobs roared through the streets
nightly, sacking, burning, killing, unmolested, uninterrupted.
The sun rose upon wrecked and smoking buildings, and upon
mutilated corpses lying here, there, and yonder about the
streets, just as they fell, and stripped naked by thieves, the un-
holy gleaners after the mob. None had the courage to gather
these dead for burial; they were left there to rot and create
plagues.
And plagues they did create. Epidemics swept away the
people like flies, and the burials were conducted secretly and
by night, for public funerals were not allowed, lest the revela-
tion of the magnitude of the plague's work unman the people
and plunge them into despair. Then came, finally, the bitterest
winter which had visited France in five hundred years. Famine,
pestilence, slaughter, ice, snow—Paris had all these at once.
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